The darker twists of passion

Tag Archives: dystopian

Pandemonia: Combustible will be available on Amazon at a 65% discounted price – February 18th – gete it for only .99!

Combustible (Pandemonia)

(#MM, #futuristic, #dystopian, #erotic romance, #BDSM)

Earth of 4035 is a wasteland populated with sectors of penal colonies, seeded through the generations by its life-long inhabitants of criminals, lunatics, political prisoners, and DNA-spliced mutants, all ruled by a powerful conglomerate of scientific researchers called the Nucleate.

One such sector, Pandemonia, is situated on the former European continent in the vicinity of Paris, now a hunting ground of a world gone horribly awry.

Drayce Eth, of dragogen-spliced DNA creation, rules one quandrant of Old Paris with a strong hand. He has never mated, never taken a long-term lover, and has always denied the instincts of his dragogen-spliced DNA. But then he encounters an attractive disciple and slave of his arch-enemy, Dr. Francois Beljon, and a simple game of poke-the-bear to relieve his ennui may just result in more than Drayce ever expected. It may also be exactly what he needs when his mating instincts are aroused by this least likely of potential mates.

Crispen Wills is a product of the mean streets. He’s a survivor—a dancer, a liar, a scavenger, and whatever else will serve to keep him alive. But when he becomes a desirable pawn in a treacherous game, it could easily cost him his life. What Crispen never expects is to fall in love with the powerful dragogen that his master has sent him to destroy.

Passions mix with danger in a highly flammable game devoid of rules and safe words, where all’s fair in love, lust…and death. Only a fool would dare to risk everything for a fleeting chance at love, especially when that lover could easily barbecue you should you make one false step.

Pandemonium: a place or scene of riotous uproar or utter chaos. Bedlam. Turmoil. Babel. The capital of Hell.

I saw a cave, I saw two men, and I began to write, and I called this piece, “Dragon City.” I let it take me where it wanted to go. Crispen had heard the rumors, but until this moment, he hadn’t believed they were real.

One sentence leads to another, one thought follows, and barrels into the next. The man glared at him steadily until Crispen was certain he could see flames in both his eyes. He reared back, landing against the wall.

And suddenly a premise materializes: It was the animals who ran the asylum and the humans who served. But tied into that premise is the next: that humans are sometimes the savages, the predators. And thus the crazy world of Pandemonia began to morph.

“You have no life anymore. You belong to me now…”

“Forfeit,” Crispen said.

“For as long as I want it. Isn’t that the law in Dragon City?”

And so it began, the morphing of a world, the shaping, the creation, the defining of character.

Pandemonia is a dangerous future, where earth is now made up of prison colonies and societies are not what they once were. Pandemonia is controlled by a conglomerate of scientists called the Nucleate. And mutants, such as Drayce, one of the gen species they gleefully, maniacally create, have been incarcerated in Pandemonia when the end of the most recent intergalactic war ended their usefulness to the interglobal councils.

Societies and civilizations turned and twisted, no longer recognizable, laws of humanity mutilated by needs, instinct, and the powers of the Nucleate. This is the world of Pandemonia, a future world gone reimagined darkly.

I had an idea. Or maybe it’s that statement that started with what if? How many times do you hear that from an author?

That’s indeed how Silver and the whole world of Humanotica was created. I didn’t know the characters when I started writing the first scene that popped into my head. I was free writing and didn’t worry about genres, or correctness, or anything but the characters playing out the scene. I saw an intriguing figure – part man, part woman, but…there was more. Another day passed, and another scene popped into my head. I saw the man who “owned” her. And at first I thought he was the villain. I wrote another scene, and then another. And suddenly I saw the layers to my villain-hero. And I became intrigued, and challenged. And even more excited about the strange alliance/attraction that sprung up between these individuals in a world of fetishes and exotic modifications. A world of complex people with complex motives. And then another character popped onto the scene, further complicating relationships. And I couldn’t not write this story.

Would it sell? I couldn’t worry about it. Would people like it or think I totally lost my mind? Couldn’t worry about that either. I love world building, I love reaching for the impossible, I love wondering about what ifs. I like delving into emotions and attractions and complicated personalities. I want to take someone you should hate and reshape them. I want to take someone you might pity and fashion their strengths through those very flaws that look to defeat them. I want to take that alpha and drop him or her to their knees. I want to take a beta and give her or him strong depth and a keen intelligence and perspective you might not expect. I want to create a romance out of the unexpected.

I want to take a city and turn it on its ear, display sexual dominance and experimentation as an art form and negotiating tool ruled over by a class of nobility known as the Dominatae who polish and hone their lifestyle into a fine edge of flawless perfection and darkest power. I want to blend male and female, human and machine, spiritual and earthly.

And then I want to create and play with the machines of that world. In Quentopolis you will find the huge underground life source, the Elite Logical Life Core, the heart and brain of the city. Or the intellometer that allows its creator to divine the workings of the mind through patterns punched onto gold Politico-issued punch cards, offering intimate insight. And don’t forget the musicadium that records music, mating it with emotion using divinely erotic stimulation.

Meet the Quentopians, the Orictian warriors, the Faunfolk, the Malefici Carnaliad sorcerers. Fight against the Politicos along side the Metallitionist Resistance Fighters who seek freedom for the humanotics. Have a drink at the Music Box Saloon that offers the best in festish humanotic entertainment. There’s more, so much more to be discovered in Quentopolis.

Enter this city at your own risk. And that’s about how I’d describe my mind as well. Risky, twisted, and always conniving, never completely at rest. Worlds are fashioned and formed a piece at a time. I slide the pieces together, sometimes reshape a piece here or there. I wait for revelation and a-ha moments, and reshape some more. I listen, and I listen some more. It’s a big world – a living world – and there’s a lot more to come.

Now, back into your cave, writer. The whip cracks and I feel the sting of creativity flick keenly across my senses. Back, I say, into that complex world, to the twisted muse that ever calls for more. And I must obey.

No better way to finish off the year than with a book sale, and even better when some of those books are free. Smashwords is having an End Of Year Sale from December 25th-January 1st. This might be a great time to catch up with those reads you haven’t had a chance to get to.

Wind down with a good book, grab a cup of what makes you happy, and enjoy some of these free and discounted books on me. Readers are the best and I hope you’re having a great holiday season and all the best for an outstanding 2019!

On to what’s free and discounted and the codes to get these special holiday deals:

Silver

#GLBT #scifantasy #intersex #erotic
Born to freedom. Molded into submission. Pleasure is her only weapon.

Silver, born female, is now an owned gender-mated trinex thanks to the edicts of the Politico Judicalati and time imprisoned at the Factorium. She must choose between her charismatic power-elite, secretive owner, Minister of Acquisitions & Antiquities, Lel Kesselbaum, and a seductive revolutionary, Entreus, a humanotic who tempts her with freedom.

Not all is as it seems–allies who may be traitors, lovers who are more than they appear. A power-mad government, a machine known as the Elite Logical Life Core that uses human intelligence for its knowledge source. The Factorium that acquires humans as research fodder for their experiments and then spits them out when they are of no further use. Sex used as a tool to unearth enemies and traitors, and intimately align allies. Love that is not simple, relationships that are dangerously complex. This is Silver’s highly-complex world.

One misstep in the fight for freedom could mean death for them all.

EXCERPT

Minister Lel Kesselbaum was not where common masses would have expected a government minister to be. But most of the Politico nobility held interests far beyond their public duty to serve. He sat in the private office on the second floor of the exclusive Music Box Saloon, overlooking the dance floor below where six platforms replicated music boxes. A scantily clad dancer gyrated atop each one, the sound of light, tinkling music a strange, rather bizarre contrast to the dancers’ erotic undulations.

The Music Box catered to humanotic fetishists. Every employee was at least one percent robotized, several being as much as forty-nine percent, just shy of the slender fraction of a percentage that turned a human into possessable chattel under the laws of the current government. All employees of the Music Box were free citizens and had free choice insofar as it went— Lel made certain of it. They could choose to work at the saloon, or not. But, situations being what they were in Quentopolis, common citizens grappled for what steady work they could find. Working at the Music Box was better than starving in the workhouses. And Kesselbaum’s saloon offered a cleaner, more lucrative means of gainful employment than other sex trade work—or other limited, legal choices that involved harder, often dangerous labor at the various institutions and murky private establishments throughout the city.

Three of the dancers were female-fused humanotics, their names chosen to titillate the interest of the elite patrons. Tonight, Coral Doll was outfitted as a ballerina, Lily Lovely as a Politico Regulate, Candy Sweet as an educatory factor. Then there were the men, Lel’s particular addiction, which included Rod Ebony outfitted as an E.L.L.C. engineer, Dandy Sugar dressed as an earthy fire containment waterboy and Dick Daring rigged out in black leather equipment appropriate for a carriage team.

Each dancer also wore the delicate wire-net cap Lel had designed, allowing them to communicate with the patrons of the Music Box. The round, gleaming, black-and-white checkerboard tables placed around the perimeter of each platform contained small silver-plated communication horns that allowed patrons to listen to or speak to the dancer. A silver vacuum tube connected from the table to the base of the platform, allowing patrons to tip the dancers.

There was no touching of the dancers during public performance at the Music Box. But a patron could request private audience for a weighty additional fee.

As Lel watched, Ebony released the minuscule leather triangle barely covering his thick, rigid prick, apparently in response to a request from table fifteen. The ambassador seated at the table placed several gold coins into the tube that were then sucked into the locked box beneath Ebony’s platform. Ebony smiled at the man, thrust his hips and proceeded to masturbate in as lewd a fashion as he could manage.

Lel’s cock surged to a rock-hard bulge, pressing prominently against the front of his trousers. He was not one to deny himself the pleasures of the flesh, but in recent months, since the acquisition of his trinex, he’d found that his desire to receive service from any of the humanotics at the saloon had lessened. At some level he found that realization slightly troubling. He favored variety—or at least he had before her acquisition. For a man in his position, it was dangerous to focus his attentions on one sex chattel—both to his position in the Dominatae and to himself personally. Let alone to the chattel. By his nature, different than that of other Dominatae, Lel’s unusually voracious appetite and need for sufficient infusion of sexual energy was not conducive to confining himself to one chattel. He’d found in the past it was dangerous to their well-being.

Complicating his current state of affairs was the fact that Silver was still settled at the Factorium for her latest modifications. He found his domicilia uncomfortably silent without her presence. Thus, in her absence, he’d taken to spending more and more time at the saloon, watching his dancers—but in the end not actually playing with them. They could not satisfy his more refined tastes for a special brand of humanotic—one he had designed himself. All he could think of was his trinex and the feel of her tight passage wrapped around his dick. He forced the thought away. He was of the Dominatae, and sexual variety for his class was almost a law.

Silver’s modifications at the Factorium were taking longer than he’d expected, but he was assured the adjustments had been successful and that tomorrow she would be delivered to his residence.

A knock sounded on the door to his private office, and he turned away from the erotic scene acted out on the main floor.

Pandemonia: Combustible

(#MM, #futuristic, #dystopian, #menage #erotic romance, #BDSM)

Earth of 4035 is a wasteland populated with sectors of penal colonies, seeded through the generations by its life-long inhabitants of criminals, lunatics, political prisoners, and DNA-spliced mutants, all ruled by a powerful conglomerate of scientific researchers called the Nucleate.

One such sector, Pandemonia, is situated on the former European continent in the vicinity of Paris, now a hunting ground of a world gone horribly awry.

Drayce Eth, of dragogen-spliced DNA creation, rules one quandrant of Old Paris with a strong hand. He has never mated, never taken a long-term lover, and has always denied the instincts of his dragogen-spliced DNA. But then he encounters an attractive disciple and slave of his arch-enemy, Dr. Francois Beljon, and a simple game of poke-the-bear to relieve his ennui may just result in more than Drayce ever expected. It may also be exactly what he needs when his mating instincts are aroused by this least likely of potential mates.

Crispen Wills is a product of the mean streets. He’s a survivor—a dancer, a liar, a scavenger, and whatever else will serve to keep him alive. But when he becomes a desirable pawn in a treacherous game, it could easily cost him his life. What Crispen never expects is to fall in love with the powerful dragogen that his master has sent him to destroy.

Passions mix with danger in a highly flammable game devoid of rules and safe words, where all’s fair in love, lust…and death. Only a fool would dare to risk everything for a fleeting chance at love, especially when that lover could easily barbecue you should you make one false step.

EXCERPT

“Have Ion send the boy to me after his performance tonight. Let’s see if we can squeeze any more information out of him than he’s deigned to share thus far. Any tidbit we can discern about the running of the cathedral gives us ammunition for future consideration.”

“I can have Taylor beat it out of him,” Zadrian suggested.

Ever since the loss of his lover, Zadrian had become even more bloodthirsty in his tactics. Sometimes he took some reining in. His canine nature was beginning to consume his humazoid side. It had been over a year since he’d lost Jazz to the Nucleate. He had to repair himself. He needed a new focus.

“Zadrian, reel it in. I said not yet. Just send the whelp to me.”

Zadrian saluted. “As you command, boss.”

“Fuck you,” Drayce responded.

Zadrian grinned, exposing his sharp teeth, but the amusement never entered his eyes. It never did these days. “Hell, you want him, you might as well take him. That is what you want, isn’t it? You want to fuck him. That’s why you’re dragging your spikes on this one. Shall I tell Ion to deliver him with a bottle of barbecue sauce?”

Drayce ignored the last taunt. Sometimes Zadrian overstepped. But then the captain had been around a long time. There was no point in lying. Zadrian would see right through that and think less of him for doing it.

“What I want and what I’ll take are two different things entirely. You know that. The whelp is here for one reason.”

“Do you really think Beljon will barter for his return? Beljon has no concern for human life. He’ll just replace this one with another. If he doesn’t get what he wants, he’ll just kill or use it for experimentation. And then destroy it when it goes bad.”

Drayce glared at Zadrian. “Jazz again.”

And now there was emotion in Zadrian’s eyes. Pain flared and Drayce heard the low rumbling growl in his throat.

“We almost lost you as well, if you’ll recall, when they went after him to get to you. That’s all that was about—getting to you. They would have killed him anyway. He was never strong enough to survive here. Even with you protecting him.”

“Fine. But you should remember as well. The weak ones don’t survive long. The whelp is a pretty little thing, but he can’t last long. Use him up, entertain yourself, but I wouldn’t recommend getting attached. He won’t survive either.”

If he was truly weak as he pretended to be, Drayce would agree. But Drayce had watched Crispen these last nights, and Crispen was far from weak. In fact, there was an undercurrent about him that told Drayce above all else, he was a survivor. A devious sort of survivor. Not at all what he appeared. And only a strong, steady hand could bring him to heel. But Drayce didn’t have the time to take on a pet. And Zadrian was right about one thing. In their world, pets didn’t really survive very long. There were traitors in every sector, and the Rouge was no exception. And it was the weak ones on whom they preyed.

Zadrian stared back at him, neither man relenting, nor looking away. In another man, Drayce would have considered it a challenge to be met and the upper hand forced. But then, as though knowing he had to be first, Zadrian looked away. He nodded. “All right, Drayce. Have it your way. But we can’t wait forever. We’ll only look weak. We’re going to have to do something. Toy with it and then finish this thing.”

“I’m not felinogen in that respect. Just remember that. I don’t toy without a purpose. You just be careful it’s not strictly revenge you’re after, and you lose your head and your life because of it.”

Zadrian stared at him with a bleak look. “I lost my life a year ago, Drayce. There really isn’t much left for me to lose. Beljon made his point very clearly.” He spun about and stalked out the door.

Drayce felt for the man. He’d lost his mate, and the DNA in Zadrian’s blood probably wouldn’t let him accept another, at least not easily. It was the way the caninogens were marked. One life, one mate. Dragogens, on the other hand, had no problem keeping a herd full of amusements. Like felinogens in some ways, they were fond of dominating multiple partners. Maybe he was too much like Beljon, and that was a truly distasteful thought. Or maybe Beljon had a bit of dragogen DNA in his make-up. Yeah, that was a much more palatable thought.

Drayce hadn’t built a herd of his own. That sort of thing made a man vulnerable in a place like this. Instead, with running an establishment like the Rouge, he had a plentiful supply of dancers who came and went in his bed when he felt a particular itch, flitting in and out as he wanted. Which is why he couldn’t figure out why he was so fixated on this whelp. He didn’t need him, but damned if he didn’t want him. Far more than he should.

In Quentopolis women have been relegated to secondary status in many cases. Women of the working class society, lead very difficult lives. The Elite are treated more as pampered dolls, cosseted and spoiled, to be seen but not heard, with some similarity to that experienced in the 19th century. Yet, as with any society, there are some who do not tow the line, who break from this suffocating sort of bondage.

There are women–some surviving by their wits and intelligence, some by courage and an adventurous spirit–these are women who strive to break free. Some, like Silver from the first book in this series, end up paying a high price, including human and personal freedom. For some, such as the courtesan madam, Violette Goldswan, they wield their power through different, more shadowy avenues. And some, like Haevyn Breina, will attempt to rise through the more public ranks, clawing their way to a position where they have a chance of gaining societal acceptance as an equal, and gaining respect in the more demanding arena of this male-dominated society. None of this is accomplished without emotional cost. None of these women face and accept the challenges of this rather brutal society in quite the same way. For Haevyn, the rewards are worth the steep price. She does not back down from doing what must be done.

In Quentopolis, sexual relations and sexuality are very open and accepted parts of this society. For some it is about pleasure, for some it is a tool to rise through the ranks. Sex is used for negotiation; it is also a shared bond between friends. And it is also an art form, highly prized by a nobility class known as the Dominatae.

Haevyn Breina is of the Moondown Water District working class. Her parents were killed in a factory fire, leaving the care of her younger brother, Bhrett, in her hands. Responsibility came to her at a young age and she accepted it, along with every hardship and payment that security demanded. She gave up her virginity to a higher purpose and though it left her bruised and battered, she has never regretted her choices. When a brand new arm of the Regulate opens up to females, she jumps at the chance, even though strictly speaking the Compsociate Branch is considered by many to be simply a finely labeled government sanctioned army of courtesans in service to the upper Regulate officers. Haevyn accepts the challenge determined to rise within the ranks, but it is not without additional damage to her psyche.

Her lover and friend, Grisha, has served as her anchor, her “calm, safe haven” throughout her life. A simple fisherman, he is far distanced from the machinations of the political arena. But Grisha, more wise than Haevyn realizes, knows there is more that his lovely, wounded lover needs than the warmth and healing of his loving embrace. He knows very well how close to the edge she really is. But so is his other lover, an expatriate Orictan warrior by the name of Entreus.

In any world an emotional cost must attach, though all creatures deal with trauma differently. Some will splinter, some will rise to meet the challenge of adversity and fashion it into their strength. Some bear an anger or rage–they try to ignore or funnel through some other channel. Entreus funnels his rage and frustration through the illegal Cockrage events. Haevyn tries to bury her anger beneath a veneer of tightly-held control. Grisha knows this about each of them and has a sense of their needs.

How these three people adapt, grow, and hopefully heal is at the emotional core of this story. The journey is complicated by a very dangerous and deadly enemy to the city-state whom they must battle.

This is the world of Humanotica. Read an excerpt from “Haevyn,” the second book in the Humanotica series…